Causal Loop

September 17th, 2366 was the day that humanity used a massive particle accelerator to try and make another universe.

Arnold Fisby looked out at the small section of the accelerator he could see, granted that it had the diameter of the Solar System. The entire object was made of carbon nanotubes to hold it together, and was going to slam two five-kilogram masses together and, hopefully, create another universe.

A wormhole would then open, connecting the two, releasing all of that energy into our universe– most likely destroying the surrounding area. To avert this, a closed timelike curve (CTC) was created to send the damage back in time.

“But won’t that just kill something earlier? Or cause a paradox?”

“It doesn’t matter, kid,” Fisby told the intern Angelica. “We’re doin’ this. Deal with it.” Almost right on cue, the countdown to collision started. A CUP (compressed ultrafast photography) camera would watch the two masses collide, and a “gravity doughnut” would cycle the damage into the past. The countdown ended, and the CUP caught the stunning footage. Fisby and the intern watched.

“Wow!” Fisby couldn’t help saying. “Can you believe that?”

“I don’t know,” the intern pressed. “I really just don’t like the idea of shoving our problems to the past. It’s like inverse procrastination.”

“Too late now,” he replied. “It’s already pushed it back farther than the human race has existed.”

Another intern, Thomas, pondered this for a minute, and thought of something startling.

“We”re pushing the damage into the past, right? But how far?”

“Really far now,” a technician said. “If we deactivated the CTC now, it would come back one billion years in the past.”

“And how long before we can safely open the CTC?”

“About twenty minutes.”

Interesting. Almost exactly thirteen times the amount of time we’ve been here, Thomas thought.

“What are you getting at?” Fisby pressed.

“Well, if we’ve already been here for about a minute-and-a-half, and that equals a billion years, twenty minutes would put the damage from the new universe at 14 billion years ago.”

Fisby finally understood, but Thomas continued for everyone else’s benefit.

“Might we not be creating A universe, but THE universe?”

September 17th, 2366 was also the day humanity realized that it had created the universe.